Sommerville-Software-Engineering-10ed

Chapter 19 ■ Further reading 577
Key Points
■ Systems engineering is concerned with all aspects of specifying, buying, designing, and testing
complex sociotechnical systems.
■ Sociotechnical systems include computer hardware, software, and people, and are situated
within an organization. They are designed to support organizational or business goals and
objectives.
■ The emergent properties of a system are characteristics of the system as a whole rather than of
its component parts. They include properties such as performance, reliability, usability, safety,
and security.
■ The fundamental systems engineering processes are conceptual systems design, system procurement,
system development, and system operation.
■ Conceptual systems design is a key activity where high-level system requirements and a vision
of the operational system is developed.
■ System procurement covers all of the activities involved in deciding what system to buy and who
should supply that system. Different procurement processes are used for off-the-shelf application
systems, configurable COTS systems, and custom systems.
■ System development processes include requirements specification, design, construction, integration,
and testing.
■ When a system is put into use, the operational processes and the system itself inevitably change
to reflect changes to the business requirements and the system’s environment.
Further Reading
“Airport 95: Automated Baggage System.” An excellent, readable case study of what can go wrong
with a systems engineering project and how software tends to get the blame for wider systems failures.
(ACM Software Engineering Notes, 21, March 1996). http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/227531.227544
“Fundamentals of Systems Engineering.” This is the introductory chapter in NASA’s systems engineering
handbook. It presents an overview of the systems engineering process for space systems.
Although these are mostly technical systems, there are sociotechnical issues to be considered.
Dependability is obviously critically important. (In NASA Systems Engineering Handbook, NASA-SP
2007-6105, 2007). http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20080008301_2008008500.pdf
The LSCITS Socio-technical Systems Handbook. This handbook introduces sociotechnical systems in
an accessible way and provides access to more detailed papers on sociotechnical topics. (Various
authors, 2012). http://archive.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/STSE-Handbook
Architecting systems: Concepts, Principles and Practice. This is a refreshingly different book on systems
engineering that does not have the hardware focus of many “traditional” systems engineering books.